Stefan is Silas’s doppelganger. He’s inside a locked steel safe at the bottom of the quarry lake getting his Angel on – drowning and dying over and over and over and over again – while Silas walks around wearing his face and being tedious and not nearly as much fun as evil!Stefan should be.

Matt spent his summer traipsing around Europe with Rebekah, experiencing its culture and great cities and having the sexy three-way times with strange super-special-ring-of-not-dying stealing women called Nadia. And then he took Rebekah up on her offer to glahmuh him into the college of his choice and excelled and reached the full potential he was always meant to, far away from the madness and death and darkness of Mystic Falls, THE END. TEAM QB1 FOREVER! Yeah, except he totally doesn’t. Oh, Matt. LOOK AT YOUR LIFE. LOOK AT YOUR CHOICES. Ask yourself why Nadia is in Mystic Falls and how she found you before you follow her into a dark alley and get jumped from behind by some guy who says an incantation in a Slavic language over your pretty blonde head and your eyes FLIP BLACK LIKE A DEMON’S, EEEEP!

Elena force fed Katherine The Cure (the tedious, tedious cure) and now she’s human. A miserable, ratty haired, chipped nail, hot mess of a human. She has enemies. She’s weak and she’s slow. “Do you have any idea what it’s like to run in heels? I have blisters!” Boone doesn’t think twice about offering to re-vamp her. Katherine reluctantly refuses. She took The Cure. If she dies – even with vampire blood in her system – there’s the very good chance that she may stay dead.

Elena and Boone never really noticed Stefan’s absence, too busy being in luuuurve, and having the sexy times, and making Jeremy want to claw his eyes out and just go move in with Matt every time he catches them making out on the sofa. He’s also faced with the challenge of the whole ‘not dead’ thing, which he waves away thusly:

“There were issues at home. Ever since I lost my parents, my aunt, I’ve been acting out. Drugs. Drinking. I was looking for attention, so I lit my house on fire and faked my own death.”

Mystic Falls collectively shrugs and says, ‘As one would.’

“The freak who faked his own death can’t also be late for math.” Jeremy attempts to return to the school that held a memorial for him and resume his life. His classmates don’t make it easy for him. Two of them decide it would be a good idea to hassle the kid WITH THE BABY PADALECKI SIZED SHOULDERS who (allegedly) deals with stress by burning houses to the ground. Jeremy kicks the krep out of them and promptly gets expelled.

Elena and Caroline begin their freshman year at Whitmore College, which based on the actual geography of these fictional places is probably Longwood University. Elena totally strikes me as a Longwood girl. Caroline, however, screams William and Mary, so. They settle into their gi-freaking-normous dorm room, which based on my experiences in a public Virginia college, should be chock-a-block with bunk beds and housing at least a dozen girls. Instead it’s just the two of them. And Megan. Caroline immediately flips a snit at finding herself in a triple. Megan’s juicer TAKES UP ALL THE SMALL APPLIANCE SPACE! GOD! And Caroline needs her personal space. “What if we suddenly get a craving and I want to eat her?” Hee! Or their blood bags go bad because they can’t store them in the mini fridge? In a fit of pique, Caroline decides to drink all of Megan’s protein water. Maybe that will make her want to move out. She takes a sip and falls to the floor, choking and gagging. The water is laced with vervain.

Caroline decides they should lock Megan up until the vervain is out of her system and then glahmuh her into forgetting they exist. “Caroline, I’m not kidnapping our roommate!” Elena counsels that the best way to convince Megan that they’re normal, is to actually be normal. Her plan to indulge in normal freshman-ie things like on-campus keggers is soon derailed. She and Caroline are left awkwardly standing at the threshold of Whitmore House, barred from entering without an invitation. Megan blandly accepts Caroline’s lie that they’re waiting for someone and enjoys the party without them. Sometime later she calls Elena in a panic. There’s someone chasing her! They have to help her! And then her body comes crashing through a window and lands on the ground behind them. Her throat is ripped open. She’s been killed by a vampire. Campus police respond to the scene and are all, suicide because note. Case closed.

The girls go back to their room to find the door open and Megan’s product placement gone. Elena begins flipping through the pictures on Megan’s (pocketed by Caroline) cell phone looking for anything that might help. Fluffy puppy. Smiling selfie. Elena’s dead father. “Who is this girl?”

“If I have to hear the word ‘doppelganger’ one more time, I think I’m going to actually have to learn how to spell it.” Silas reveals himself to Boone because he can’t resist monologuing. He also wants to make a trade – Katherine for Stefan. Boone calls Jeremy as he’s on his way out of town with her. “Turn around. Bring her back.” Katherine is appalled – appalled – that the people she has repeatedly betrayed, hurt, and/or tried to kill are so readily willing to hand her over. She jerks the wheel of the car from Jeremy’s hands and sends them into a light pole. She stumbles away from the wreckage, leaving Jeremy in the road to die. Boone arrives in the nick to revive him. He doesn’t care that Katherine is gone. He’s just relieved that he doesn’t have to call Elena at school to tell her that her brother is dead again some more.

Bonnie has been taking great pains to make sure no one learns that she is actually, well and truly dead. She dictates texts to Jeremy, which he sends to her friends from her phone, and mails postcards to her dad from all of the far off places she’s supposedly visiting with her mom. “What happens when your dad finds out you’ve been dead all summer?” Silas solves that problem for her. He tests the extent of his mind control powers by glahmuhing everyone in the town square to remain silent and still. Bonnie is the only one who screams when Silas slits her father’s throat. “Now that I have your attention, I need a favor. I need you to find someone. You all know Elena Gilbert … well, the girl that I’m looking for looks exactly like her.”